FuturePrint Podcast
FuturePrint is dedicated to and passionate about the power of print technology to enable new opportunities and create new value. This pod features deep-dive discussions with the people behind the tech as well as market analysis, trends, marketing and storytelling!
FuturePrint Podcast
#255 - Packaging Innovations in the Nordic Region
From Finland’s papermaking giants to Sweden’s design-led start-ups, the region is combining deep industrial heritage with cutting-edge innovation. Archipelago’s Powerdrop system makes paper containers waterproof, oilproof, and recyclable — running fast enough to match moulded pulp lines, and ready for global deployment.
This isn’t just sustainable design. It’s a scalable business model — and a major opportunity for the print and coatings industry.
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FuturePrint TECH: Industrial Print: 21-22 January '26, Munich, Germany
Welcome to the FuturePrint podcast celebrating print technology and the people behind it.
Speaker 2:Welcome to this week's FuturePrint podcast. In this episode, we're going to talk about innovations shaping the future of sustainable materials. Today we'll be talking about packaging innovations, specifically in Scandinavia and the Nordic regions. And today I have with me Guy Newcomb from Archipelago. Welcome, guy, how are you today?
Speaker 3:Hello, very good Good to be here.
Speaker 2:Fantastic, it's great to have you on board today. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you do and what Archipelago does?
Speaker 3:about what you do and what Archipelago does? Yes, certainly so. We're all about coating paper to enable paper to replace plastic packaging. So plastic packaging is a big problem. Every year, we make something like 150 million tonnes of plastic, but only 10% of that is recycled. The other 135 million tonnes is either burnt, buried or thrown into the sea.
Speaker 3:It's a huge problem and it's a problem that governments and companies and consumers all want to solve. So there's a big move to move from plastic to paper. But there's a problem with paper in that it's not waterproof. So that's where Archipelago and PowerDrop come in, that we coat paper to give it the good waterproof properties. But also it can be recycled just like ordinary paper in conventional recycling units.
Speaker 2:Okay, fantastic, that sounds great. So why are we talking about Scandinavia today? So we obviously know that they've got a reputation for leading sustainable innovation. From your perspective, what sets Scandinavia and the Nordic regions apart, and what's their approach to packaging?
Speaker 3:Well, the Nordic regions and the Scandinavian regions that are world leaders for making paper. So paper has been made in Finland and in Sweden for 125 years. They have these very big, very successful paper making companies, paper-making companies, but they also have a number of much younger, innovative companies who are creating three-dimensional shapes out of paper, and these companies are very vocal on the international scene. You've got companies like Polpak, you've got companies like Yangi, you've got Blue Ocean Closures. They're all well known and they're all doing great things. So you've got a combination of what you might call the traditional but highly experienced paper companies in these regions, very well funded, very good reputation, and you've also got the drive that's coming through from these, from these startups, okay, and do you think sort of from the consumer side, there's a big demand as well from from scandinavian people.
Speaker 2:Do you think that's driving it as well?
Speaker 3:well, I think there's a mix. I mean, I think across the whole of europe there's a a desire, uh, to see this move from plastic to paper and, interestingly, just been announced this collaboration between Sora Enzo, who've got a base in Finland, and Sweden, with Matrix Pack, who are based in Greece, and they've announced a big cooperation to work together to expand this move from plastic to paper. So it goes wider than Scandinavia. It's really a European wide movement of driven again by consumers, also by big companies. All of the big, all of the big brands are helping to drive this. Many of them have come to the conferences P&G, unilever, diageo, nestle, they're all at the conferences and they're all driving this move.
Speaker 2:Okay, and did I see something you posted on LinkedIn about IKEA and sort of the plastic bags being? Maybe they were then going to use some paper bags instead?
Speaker 3:Yes, IKEA have just announced that they're going to be replacing plastic bags in their furniture flat packs with paper bags. So again, this is an example of this movement, and you see, almost every day somebody is making an announcement that something that used to be packaged in plastic is now packaged in paper.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's great. And so what's Archipelago's involvement, then, with Scandinavia in the Nordic region? How do you come in?
Speaker 3:Well, we're in contact really with all of these famous companies. I can't go into too much detail about specific examples, but at the conferences we've talked about some of the things we're doing. But we're working with the big companies and with the startups, both the companies that make using wet moulding, the companies that are using dry moulding. Many companies are actually pursuing both of these techniques, both dry and wet. But all of these companies all of these companies have in common is the thing they're making is not waterproof or it's not oil proof. So we are helping them coat their containers, their 3D containers, to make them waterproof and oil-proof, and the good news for us is that we've established a reputation. We're now really the go-to company that people come to us when they want their container waterproof or oil proof. So so I can't mention none companies precisely by name, but I can say we're talking and working with just about everybody in in the region and that's a that's an awful lot of companies, an awful lot of skilled people and an awful lot of innovation and something innovation and something I can talk about.
Speaker 3:There are two big research institutes VTT in Finland and there's RISE in Sweden. They've both been really instrumental in pushing this. They've been working, innovating in pulp for 20, 30, 40 years. They've been pushing these innovations 30, 40 years. They've been pushing these innovations. Vtt was a very early customer of Archipelago. We know them very well. We've just got to know RISE. In Sweden we attended the RISE Moulded Fibre Conference last September and this year we'll be talking at the RISE Conference in Stockholm. All about how to create pinhole-free coatings using PowerDrop. And if you see who's coming to that RISE conference, it's almost a who's who of who's making things happen in this move from plastic to paper.
Speaker 2:Okay, and I mean I know Archipelago really well, but just for our listeners today, archipelago really well, but just for the, for our listeners today, um, how, how do your, how fast could you, can you print? So would it slot in, would your technology slot into one of these big um production plants, for example?
Speaker 3:yeah, that's a really good question, eleanor. So we've designed our machine so it can coat 100 million containers a year. The exact number depends slightly on the size of the container, but we can configure it for different containers and we're getting throughputs of 100 million containers a year. And that matches the throughput of a wet moulding process and also a dry moulding process, so that if you have a dry moulder or a wet moulder in your line and you need to coat, you can put a power drop container, a coater, in line with your moulding machine and it will, and it will keep up.
Speaker 3:When you run the numbers, they are interesting that the total number of plastic containers is very large. It's something of the order of 8,000 billion containers a year. That's huge, that's massive, almost unimaginable number of containers. But again, if we're honest with ourselves and we think, how many containers do we open every day? Um, whether it's a milk carton, um, or a um, or a cheese, cheese carton or meat tray, um, you can see where these, where these numbers, are coming from. So our plans take us up to making something like 7,000 power drop coaters, which is comparable to the number of inkjet tile printers in the world. So again, just giving people, people, your listeners, many of whom will be familiar with the inkjet world, uh, that this opportunity is is going to be bigger than inkjet printing ceramics, uh and um, and and the market you know the market's wider that you only get your your bathroom tiled, um, every so often, uh, but you'll be buying cartons of milk and trays of meat every day. So that's where the scale is and we're ready for that, to meet that opportunity.
Speaker 2:Brilliant. I mean you've been talking about containers specifically in the food industry, but I'm assuming if you look at the whole cosmetics industry and and that side of things, I mean the market must be huge and the drive, consumer drive to change all these plastic little bottles is enormous yeah, yeah and uh, absolutely.
Speaker 3:I mean you go around, um, you go around boots or super drug or uh or any chemist and just count up the number of containers. And again you can count up the number of containers both in your fridge and in your bathroom cabinet.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:And multiply that by a billion and that's the scale of the opportunity.
Speaker 2:Wow, it's incredible and so looking ahead for you within Archipelago. So, from your perspective, where do you see the packaging industry going? Absolutely Well, the focus, our focus.
Speaker 3:I mean we're talking to a very large number. We're working with a very large number of players in different stages. So we're working with the coatings companies, we're working with the packaging companies, we're working with start-ups, we're working with the brands. The numbers I mean when you run the numbers for meat trays, yogurt pots, uh, coffee pods, um, you know, these are, these are, these are very large numbers of, uh, very large numbers of of containers.
Speaker 2:Absolutely you mentioned coffee pods. I mean those are. They've been in the news recently.
Speaker 3:They're really bad for the environment, so oh, yeah, and and there's a big, big desire, big, uh big desire to move from metal and plastic pods to paper pods. And again, you know, just think how much coffee we're all drinking and we're replacing those metal pods and those plastic pods with paper pods which you can recycle just by posting them into your blue bin at home. So that's our focus. There's a big, big desire, big move. And the other thing is it's doable. We're coating these containers, we're sending them to our customers. They're filling them with yogurt, they're testing them and they're seeing that these pots are pinhole free. You know the technology is ready to go. The coating process is working now. It's working at the right speed. We're using, we're working with very well-known coatings companies. Their coatings are ready to go. So this whole transition, we're ready to move to making these hundreds of millions, to making these hundreds of millions, billions of containers to reduce plastic and move over to a sustainable paper alternative.
Speaker 2:That's fabulous. And you mentioned pinhole-free. I mean, I know what pinhole-free is, but our listeners might not. Can you just elaborate?
Speaker 3:on that a bit. It, yeah, certainly so. When you fill your uh container uh with yogurt or or, or, or with um, or with coffee, it's, it's very important both that the liquid doesn't leak out and that, in the case of coffee, uh, the oxygen uh doesn't, uh doesn't come in. So so, yeah, uh, so the way that things leak out or or come in is uh, is that there are little. You know, if there's a fault in the coating, there's a little hole and and and the liquid or the air passes through that hole, and that's what can cause the cause, the problem.
Speaker 3:So one thing that we have been working on for the last 18 months is developing not just the power drop jetting process, but the power drop coating process and um, and that means looking at the coating, it means looking at the substrate, it means, quite literally, looking at the substrate under a microscope. It means looking at the coating process with a high-speed camera. We've done work, we've been supported by very talented people at Queen Mary University and at UCL in London, and we've had support from Innovate UK and, and we've been running projects that have allowed us to see how the PowerDrop coating process works and how we can control the process. So we get a perfect, totally continuous pinhole-free coating over these three-dimensional containers.
Speaker 2:Which, like you say, is really important, because if you've got a plate, you leet off it once and that's it, whereas if you've got a yogurt pot that's maybe sitting in your fridge for a week, um, it really has to, you know, contain that fluid and and and do its job, basically exactly.
Speaker 3:So yeah, yeah, it needs to. It needs to, needs to, and the container needs to contain the… Contain the fluid or whatever's in it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you just touched on sort of Queen Mary, and so you do a lot with young people in the industry, don't you? Can you talk a bit about that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, certainly. We're very keen on working with young scientists and engineers. We've got about six different ways in which we do it. So we run undergraduate projects, we run postgraduate projects, we run a year in industry. So every year an engineer from Queen Mary comes here and works as embedded in the company. That's been very successful comes here and works is embedded in the company. That's been very successful. Every summer we get this summer we've got four summer interns who are paid. They, each one of them comes here for eight weeks. We give them a very specific problem. We give them a brief, we give them a desk, we give them equipment and they just dive into it and they love it and eight weeks later we've sold, we've made some major step forward with something that we wanted to do and the students really enjoy it. And then they often will give a talk or they will write an article, or they'll give a talk and write an article. And then we're also running these knowledge transfer partnerships. We've finished one with Lakshmi, as you know, who came and spoke at the conference.
Speaker 3:We're just interviewing this week. We're just interviewing for the next one, so we're very pleased. Again, we've got support from Innovate UK. We've got some really, really high-quality candidates and they're going to be interviewed this week and we'll be choosing one of those who's going to be working with us for two and a half years. So, we're really keen to bring in um talented, talented people and um and they get a lot out of it and we get a lot out of it they do.
Speaker 2:I mean, I had the privilege of of speaking to a few of them recently and they, they really, really love working for archipelago. They said, oh, it's like a family and and you're a great company to work for, so that's great, yeah, okay. So, um, is there anything else you'd like to add, or shall we wrap this podcast up?
Speaker 3:Well, I think it's worth saying. I think it's just really worth saying. You know that we regard ourselves as part of the very much part of the inkjet community. We're very pleased to take part in all of the future print activities.
Speaker 2:And we love having you on board. Great thank you.
Speaker 3:I'm seeing Fraser later today, so we're discussing a number of things that we'll be doing together, but I think, as part of the inkjet community, we do need to see this opportunity, which is big. It's as big as anything else that the inkjet world is doing. We need to see this as a as an inkjet opportunity. It's it's not just an archipelago power drop opportunity and, and particularly the coatings companies, um are aware, um, but but everybody in those companies needs to be aware that this opportunity offers the capability of them doubling, or even more than doubling, what they're currently doing in inkjet. If you run these numbers, a single coating machine, a single power drop coating machine, will use something like a million pounds worth of coating a year, and so 7,500 of these machines will be using 7.5 billion pounds of coating a year, and that is big and that is that's huge, that's big, that is big, you know if you plot out, you know what that looks like against.
Speaker 3:You know the current world of inkjet. It's very big.
Speaker 2:And it's saving the planet at the same time, which is always a bonus Big business saving the planet Exactly. Fabulous. Well, thank you to all our listeners today for tuning in, and I want to say thank you to you, guy. It's been a pleasure speaking to you today.
Speaker 3:I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have? Yeah, very much. It's been very good. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Delana no, thank you. Thank you so much, and I will post your details below the podcast.
Speaker 1:If anyone would like to get in touch with.
Speaker 2:Archipelago. They can do it. So thank you very much. Speak to you soon. Excellent, Thank you. Bye-bye.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe now for more great audio content. Coming up and visit futureprinttech for the latest news, partner interviews, in-depth industry research and to catch up on content from Futureprint events. We'll see you next time on the Futureprint Podcast.
